Simone Martini and the development of the sgraffito technique
Early in his career, Simone Martini (1280-1344), Duccio’s most talented pupil, started by copying his master’s mordant gilding technique. But as the young Sienese artist perceived how highly valued the rich ‘tartar cloth’ imported from the Mongol empire had become, he started perfecting an innovating gilding technique to more accurately portray these fabrics.
This Sgraffito technique as it came to be called, first required the whole area that was to be patterned to be water-gilded. The latter method is a much older type of gilding that consists in sticking gold leafs on wetted layers of bole (red paint), and then burnishing (polishing) it. The smooth and shining gold surface thus obtained is overlayered by a coat of paint which is then scratched (hence ‘sgraffito’ in Italian) with a small pointed tool to uncovered the gold beneath. Not only did this technique allowed to recreate precise and regular patterns, but also to texture the gilded area to reproduce the uneven texture of gold-wrapped thread.
The cloak of the archangel Gabriel in Martini’s 1333 Annunciation convincingly replicates the materiality of tartar cloths. The artists used granulation, the stamping of small dots onto the gilded surface, to recreate an uneven surface and increase the shine of the gold. It also participated in successfully conveying the illusion of gold thread sitting on top of a white silk ground, when in the panel the gold lies beneath the layer of white paint.
Comparing Martini’s painted ‘cloth of gold’ to this fourteenth-century fragment of Central Asian silk strikingly illustrates how accurately the sgraffito technique could represent such fabrics.
In fact, in Cennino Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook, sgraffito is described as specifically adequate to the depiction of fabrics. In a chapter on « how to make a cloth of gold » Cennini writes :
"If you would have a mantle, or a woman's petticoat, or a little cushion of cloth of gold, put on the gold-leaf with bole, and scratch the folds of the drapery"(Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 141)
Although Cennini's manual was published in 1437 it describes traditional painting techniques that would have been considered archaic by the time it was written and that were more representative of how Martini and his followers would have painted.
If you are interested in the sgraffito and understanding how Renaissance painters used it, sign up for the National Gallery event: "Sgraffito gilding workshop: learning the secrets of the Old Masters" and come try your hand at this technique!